GeoChat Feedback Forum

Welcome to the InSTEDD GeoChat official feedback forum. Do you have an idea? Do you recognize a good idea when you see one?
We want to hear from you!
(This is a forum to post suggestions – to ask questions, talk with our team and other users please join us here http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/geochatusers/ Thank you!)

It would be great to be able to send customized messages in response to user requests. FrontlineSMS does this as a "keyword" option, but does not allow remote definition of the messages. The purpose is to extend the amount of information available to users without having to broadcast everything to everyone. Examples of idea:

SMS is great, but there should also be an ordinary email mailing list function for when more information is needed or other email functionality (such as long term storage, file transfer) is needed. As it is now, I have to maintain a separate mailing list of the users in my Geochat groups so I can send them emails.

Given that there are 3 ways to set my location, it would be good to use one of those (or add new command) to set the location but not broadcast it to the whole group. At times we may want everyone to post their location, but we do not want to overload each user by sending her the locations of all the members. Nor do we want to disturb users in the middle of the night with a routine update of location.

It would be very helpful if we could give locations aliases so that users do not have to remember an exact way to enter the location. For example, if one location is defined as "Secretariat Jct" then aliases could include "Secretariat" and "Secretariat Junction". Even better would be matching by regular expressions!

I think the list of invited users should reflect only those who have yet to join the group. That way we can click the resend link of each person who has not accepted the invitation, without having to check for each person whether they have accepted already. We should also be able to manually remove people from the "invited" list, perhaps, and it would be nice to have a button to automatically resend the invitations to all who have not accepted yet, perhaps with an additional message of explanation.

For the longest time I could not figure out why the Map view would not show any messages.

I was stunned when I discovered that the tiny square next to the group name in the "Groups" is actually a checkbox, and that I'm supposed to click it. It looks like a list bullet.

Can you make the UI for this more discoverable (when Groups is collapsed it's impossible to tell what I need to do) and obvious (bigger, more clickable checkbox)? Perhaps instructions in the empty chat area when no groups are selected?